346 karma · joined April 3, 2009
Lamport has directly and repeatedly addressed the differences between what's desirable in a specification language versus what's desirable in a programming language. Understanding the difference is vital to writing specifications.
Consumers are free to make choices based on anything they want: but whining in public about how some tweets affect your opinion on a car is not the same thing as privately making choices. This subject was opened for discussion and it remains open.
That the K-202 was faster than the personal computers that came later is not unusual, because those later computers were based on microprocessors. Early microprocessors such as the 8008 and 8080 were not speed demons compared to LSI TTL designs of that time. The article mentions the [Data General] Super Nova as being similar in speed to the K-202.
Another interesting computer is the Datapoint 2200, another TTL design. The manufacturer went to Intel and TI to realize their CPU design on a single chip, which resulted in the 8008, a microprocessor with an almost identical instruction set and which ran slower than the original 2200.
I was looking for a hardware shifter in the diagram, because I figured it'd be necessary to access bits D1-D7. But there is none. He uses a lookup table in EEPROM to do the shift.
If you're interested in nice CPU designs, here's another one: the Novix NC4000 (also RTX2000), in which the bits in the instructions lead directly to control various muxes and units inside the chip. There's almost no decoding.
I also have a question: if a product is sold as a kit where the buyer performs the "final assembly", does that alleviate any of the burden with UL testing, FCC, or product liability?
As another commenter pointed out, coffee-makers are one area where people are willing to pay thousands, e.g. espresso machines made in Italy or Germany that are robust and largely authentic.*
*Even though many follow virtually the same design and are made from near-commodity parts.
The intent is to ridicule the left by having dupes get up in front of everyone and claim that a frog is a <the bad people> hate symbol, or that posting a square of black pixels demonstrates solidarity with anti-racism.
OR, that's what they want us to think, and the truth is that systematic countless postings of a frog is the precursor to <the bad people> world domination.
It's also curious for an open source advocate to complain about knock-off brands such as Ender and Behringer, when open source is lousy with projects that are knock offs -- sorry "open source versions" -- of commercial products.
Estimating TTC for "make a reputation system for a social network" is probably going to be harder than the same for a typical Oracle app. Mostly because the former involves some science and engineering and not just programming. But that's the point I'm trying to make: SWEs are asked all the time to solve hard problems, not just code from a detailed spec.
At various times I've been asked to design a CPU, write a C compiler, invent technology to extract simple factoids from text, and make a spellcorrector for web search. Incidentally, the approach to schedules was sometimes reasonable and sometimes unreasonable. Smaller companies tended to be less reasonable.
Such tasks are very different from UI heavy work or a typical database application, and are more difficult to estimate. Those persons writing compilers or improving web search indexing are not the same people talking about user stories. If you believe developers need to be professional and schedule their work, you're in the majority but you may not be doing truly interesting work.
[Edited to say "Software" at the beginning instead of "Software Engineering".]
Metacompilation re-uses the live, running interpreter/compiler to compile a new system image of itself, from source code.
It's important to learn from the mistakes of ____(some worse country), so that we don't continue in the direction of ____.
Yes, your scenario is one I hadn't considered. I don't know what a good resolution is there; I would suggest that DEF is not necessarily the bad guy. Maybe. But not necessarily. This one is also difficult to punt to the police since there's no clear harassment, yet ABC's torment is increasing. It's sad but I think it's often better for the child to solve the problem himself.
Schoolchildren would have to stop using any service that doesn't have a block-anonymous setting, or, accept that the school will ignore any complaints about anonymous messages. I think the biggest problem with the whole thing is that the kids won't stop using the services they want to use.
Apple could theoretically make a system setting to block unidentifiable messages (not phone calls) specifically to protect kids, in all apps on that phone.
When you speak of erasing the concern, do you mean the concern about bullying or the concern about going into children's phones and looking at text messages?
In this hypothetical scheme (described above), a child complaining about anonymous abusive messages is ignored by the school. School's not responsible, because the child's phone is set up improperly. If phone were in order, phone would not receive anonymous messages.
A child receiving a traceable abusive message is quickly resolved, and presumably this kind of abuse is rare, for obvious reasons.
Everyone is happy. The school's happy because, under this scheme, they have virtually no work to do in connection with online harassment. The police are happy because fewer harassment cases are being opened (this is true only if most kids set their phone as instructed by the school). Kids are slightly less miserable because online bullying has been made more difficult to pull off.
Finally, sticklers like the parent are happy because they can continue to set up their phone "wrong" and receive anonymous abuse. Which the school won't look into and will presumably pass off to the police.
But it's simpler to let the police handle the problem and determine whether it's harassment, or if it's a case of crybullying.
A school's not going to be able to stop bullying. But with message tracking devices in everyone's hand and cameras everywhere, the SCHOOL's problems are solvable without having to go into childrens' phones.
Is that what's happened here?
A person can argue that World War II was mostly peaceful. At any point of geography, it's quite rare that artillery shells are falling or tanks rolling through. Usually it's a quiet garden spot.
The fact is, the BLM protests were mostly peaceful. They were almost entirely peaceful. But that's not how we expect the news to cover any event that includes rioting or looting. We expect the news to lock on to the most sensational parts, however insignificant, and talk endlessly about how terrible this is and how BLM organizers should feel some responsibility for this. That's what the news would've done in any other circumstance. That's what it would have done for BLM in decades past. That's what it would have done if BLM had endorsed Trump. But because of the weird and universal sympathy news producers have for BLM, the protests were covered differently.
Maybe people think talking about unvaccinated people here is irrelevant or inflammatory or something like that; I don't know what exactly ties these stories together in my mind, but I suggest that maybe it's technophilia, that there are people who love to throw technology at every problem. Or, perhaps the hate comes from the sense of certainty some people have in their information sources, and they can't empathize with anyone who may be suffering from false or ideological info sources. Instead such people must be stupid and trolls.
If it is a lack of empathy -- I think it's more likely a lack of sophistication -- I can see this same mode of hatred and blame we are seeing now, being directed at criminals back when those draconian laws were being drafted that put the deaf man in jail.